hey am i stupid or is there seriously no way to view longitude and latitude on google maps?
i don't mean "can i find specific coordinates for the place i'm looking at" i mean i want to see the lines of longitude and latitude on the globe, like how all globes do, the ones they'd have in classrooms and bedrooms and everywhere, like old maps, you know maps? the ones you'd look at for reference? i don't understand why there's no longitude or latitude lines except some tech guys in palo alto thought they looked tacky
you know, those things? why aren't they there? why does one of the single most revolutionary technological innovations of our lifetime omit such a fundamental and rudimentary baseline of useful maps throughout history? i don't even mind that they're not automatically visible, i'm losing it that there's seemingly not even an option to place them on the map in the first place
anyway this post brought to you by "instead of writing a script sarah is looking at her childhood neighborhood and bemoaning that the dollar theater she saw pokemon the movie 2000 at has become the county's healthcare department"
@sarahzedig ok, I have a rant about this. over the last 20 years there has been a huge push towards making programs simple and easy to used by most people, with Apple being one of the biggest companies doing this. eg early google docs vs MS word. and while usability is a good thing in the abstract, this has led many companies to cut features used by advanced users, to make things simpler for the numerically most common users, because thats where a majority of the profit comes from.
@sarahzedig Real problems in real life tend to be really complicated, and require complex tools to deal with. But we are left trying to do serious work with fisher-price toy tools
@sarahzedig seems like it’s also a way to reinforce reliance on the tool rather than develop an independent skill set. Who needs to read a physical map with latitude and longitude when the mapplication does that for you?
i can't put my finger on why exactly but somehow this FEELS like a perfect example of how a lot of big revolutionary internet tools from the early 2000s have had their freely-available educational values stripped away in favor of boring bullheaded economic utility